Work Management in SharePoint or Office 365

Have you happened to miss any deadline or forgot about any task due to pending works residue in various areas? Have you ever thought of sharing the documents with external entities in a much more convenient way without relying on email?

Microsoft has been pushing the cloud for a few years now and recently launched an updated version of Office 365. The key changes to be notified are SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online.

Managing Work

SharePoint Online has added a new site type known as MySite. This feature was available in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, however, the current version had some drastic changes.

Work Management, a new feature has been included which aggregates all your tasks into a single location. When I say each and every task, it includes all the tasks that exist in Outlook, SharePoint Task lists, and even Online Projects. This usefulness enables you to arrange your tasks in a single location, schedule tasks based on the priority, include them in a personal timeline, and change the task details from the site.

Working with Documents

Another new addition to the SharePoint is SkyDrive Pro. This replaces the Shared Documents and Personal Documents libraries that existed in past versions of the SharePoint MySites. Like task aggregation table, SkyDrive aggregates the latest documents you have finished, the documents you are going to follow in the coming days and documents that have been shared to you. Every SharePoint versions hold the capacity to relocate documents into SharePoint.

Other capabilities that accompany with some of the online plans are changes to the Office Web Apps, which gives more prominent features to view and edit documents in the browser. Another new component called Office on Demand enables you to run a full version of the software (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and so on.) on any Microsoft PC without even installing it, making it less demanding to work with the documents you require while you are in a hurry.

SkyDrive Pro in SharePoint Online offers more functionality than the on-premise version of SharePoint. First of all, it comes with 7GB of storage for each user. Most companies would offend from offering users with such storage space with on-premise installations, as it could have huge cost implications per client. The greatest of all the features that accompany the cloud variant is the capacity to share the documents to users outside of the association. These users don’t require licenses.

An employee can simply tap on the lock icon of the document they need to share in the SkyDrive to open up a sharing invitation. They can enter the email address of the recipient and choose whether the user will be permitted to edit or view only. This will help users to work with one version of the document in a single location. Those external uses will be able to edit and view the document in the browser in case they don’t have the office software.

Communication

Messaging platforms have been multiplying across enterprises and have significantly improved the productivity in the past couple of years from an internal perspective. With Lync Online, we can include users from other messaging platforms; this incorporates individuals in different enterprises that utilize Lync, Windows Live, and Windows Live Messenger. Lync is present inside every Microsoft products and is tightly integrated with Office 2016, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online. How cool would it be to open up a word document to make some changes and see that another person has already made that changes? You can quickly communicate with the client from the office apps to find what they are doing.

Lync doesn’t stop there. It also incorporates web conferencing, HD video, PC to PC calling. It additionally enables you to join conferences from your smartphone. Outlook web access now incorporates a connector for LinkedIn enabling you to take a look at all of your contacts for quick access.

SharePoint Online has likewise introduced more sophisticated Enterprise Social features that help in improving the communication. Microsoft has recently launched a SharePoint Newsfeed application for examining the social features in 2016 which helps you in keeping updated on the go.

There is always more…

The services offered in the cloud are extraordinary and with the new release, you can add applications from the Microsoft Online stores for SharePoint, Outlook, Word, Excel, and Project, or you can build your own.

It is important to note that the key functionalities discussed in this post work with the On-Premise versions of the product. The only exception is sharing the document remotely from SkyDrive Pro, as this functionality is only available in SharePoint Online as of now.

In case you have any extra inquiries, or might want to schedule a demo with the Aufait team and see how the solution can address your business needs, you can reach us out.